Innovation ascendante. Foxconn's Other Dirty Secret: The World's Largest 'Internship' Program. One of the lesser-known aspects of the manufacturing behemoth behind gadgets by Apple, Amazon and many others: a giant internship program rife with abuse. Photo by Jordan Pouille. In June 2010, a university student named Liu Jiang arrived in the southern Chinese city of Foshan to begin his summer internship, at a factory that produces LCD screens for laptops and cell phones for the manufacturing giant Foxconn. As a student at the Dongfang Vocational School of Technology in the northern city of Shijiazhuang, Liu had traveled hundreds of miles for a chance to get hands-on experience working for China’s leading electronics maker.
But his internship was brief. Liu quickly became a statistic in Foxconn’s ugly worker history, a blip on the Internet radar: his was the seventeenth suicide attempt, and the thirteenth death, at a Foxconn factory that year alone. But neither Apple nor recent widely-spread reports in the mainstream media make mention of interns. Foxconn workers in Chengdu. Apple’s iPad and the Human Costs for Workers in China.
Foxconn Is Still a Hard Place to Work. As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week's Consumer Electronic's Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn. 300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times. It's not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China.
But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven't lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things. Instead of the raise they requested, these workers were given the following ultimatum: quit with compensation, or keep their jobs with no pay increase. Most quit and never got the money. That's when the mass suicide threat came in. The incident actually caused a factory wide shutdown, reports Record China.
Chine : heurts entre grévistes et la police à Shanghaï. Une grève dans une usine chinoise de chaussures Nike et Adidas fait plusieurs blessés. De violents heurts ont opposé la police chinoise et les 7 000 salariés grévistes d'une fabrique de chaussures Adidas, Nike et New Balance du sud de la Chine, a annoncé vendredi 18 novembre le China Labor Watch (CNW), spécialisé dans la défense des droits de l'homme. D'après un communiqué de l'organisation, des dizaines d'ouvriers qui protestaient contre des licenciements et des réductions de salaires ont été blessés jeudi lorsque les forces de l'ordre ont tenté de démanteler un barrage installé sur la rue principale de la ville située près de Dongguan, dans la province de Guangdong. Les salariés de l'usine de Yucheng, près de Huangjiang, se sont mis en grève après le licenciement le mois dernier de 18 de leurs cadres, interprété par les ouvriers comme un signe de prochaine délocalisation, a ajouté CNW dont le siège est à New York.
La suppression de primes de rendement et des heures supplémentaires a attisé la colère des ouvriers. The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen | George Monbiot. If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy.
This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. Such results have been widely replicated. This is now changing. The Artificiality of Modern Beauty. By Lisa Wade, PhD, Oct 14, 2011, at 10:36 am I know a guy, bless his heart, who is unendingly surprised to learn that women do things to themselves to try to be more conventionally attractive.
Most recently he learned that bleach blondes are almost always, well, bleached. He thought it was a common natural hair color for adult women. LOL. In any case, I thought the photographs below — by Zed Nelson, and sent along by zeynaparsel — were neat. They disembody the tools women use to enhance their beauty, revealing them as undeniably artificial. Eyelash extensions: Breast implants: Hair extension: Buy the book. For more from Zed Nelson, see our post on cosmetic surgery and being normal. A look inside the Foxconn suicide factory. Terry Gou, the 59-year-old billionaire who founded the company, yesterday turned his plane around on the way to Taiwan to return to the plant. In a meeting with his senior management, Mr Gou allegedly said that he would not now leave the factory until the suicides stop.
In addition, the company is said to be considering a radical plan to move 60,000 people, or 20pc of its workforce at Longhua, to other sites in western China to be “closer to their homes” in the hope that this will calm the situation. Inside the facility, workers were busily stringing nets between dormitory buildings to try to catch any further jumpers. “It is a clumsy solution, but it may save lives,” said Mr Gou. The company, which also makes dozens of electronic goods for the likes of Dell, Sony and HP, is also now blocking windows and locking doors to roofs and balconies. “The facilities at Foxconn are fine, but the management is poor,” revealed Zhu Guangbing, who organised the investigation. Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Anthropologist David Graeber argues that it is only with a general historical understanding of debt and its relationship to violence that we can begin to appreciate our emerging epoch.
Here he begins to fill in our historical knowledge gap What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call ‘the economy'. What's more, origins matter.
The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence - but also, the systematic threat of violence - maintained by the contemporary state.
The reason is simple. I.
Feticismo della merce digitale e sfruttamento nascosto: i casi Amazon e Apple Français – English – Español . La settimana scorsa The Morning Call, un quotidiano della Pennsylvania, ha pubblicato una lunga e dettagliata inchiesta – intitolata Inside Amazon’s Warehouse – sulle terribili condizioni di lavoro nei magazzini Amazon della Lehigh Valley.
Il reportage, risultato di mesi di interviste e verifiche, sta facendo il giro del mondo ed è stato ripreso dal New York Times e altri media mainstream. Il quadro è cupo: – estrema precarietà del lavoro, clima di perenne ricatto e assenza di diritti; – ritmi inumani, con velocità raddoppiate da un giorno all’altro (da 250 a 500 “colli” al giorno, senza preavviso), con una temperatura interna che supera i 40° e in almeno un’occasione ha toccato i 45°; – provvedimenti disciplinari ai danni di chi rallenta il ritmo o, semplicemente, sviene (in un rapporto del 2 giugno scorso si parla di 15 lavoratori svenuti per il caldo); – licenziamenti “esemplari” su due piedi con il reprobo scortato fuori sotto gli occhi dei colleghi.